Chicago White Sox right-hander Lucas Giolito didn’t hesitate to admit what torpedoed his horrendous start Thursday in Detroit.
“Nothing super mechanical. Just leaking. Rushing,” Giolito said. “The adjustment for that is more like controlling the speed of the game, being focused pitch to pitch. It’s not like I need to make some sort of mechanical change.”
Giolito will try to get back on track Tuesday as the White Sox continue a three-game series against the visiting Los Angeles Angels. He worked a season-low 3 2/3 innings against the Tigers after eight straight starts of at least six innings.
Giolito (3-4, 3.98 ERA) scattered four runs and six hits while walking a season-high seven batters at Detroit. He is confident the sudden control woes can be corrected soon enough.
“It’s unfortunate because that stuff is kind of avoidable if you just make the adjustment during the game, but I didn’t,” Giolito said. “It sucks, but move on.”
Giolito is 2-1 with a 3.79 ERA in seven career starts against the Angels.
Angels lefty Tyler Anderson (2-0, 4.81) isn’t so eager to forget his most recent start. On Wednesday, Anderson stopped a stretch of seven consecutive no-decisions, allowing one run and five hits in six innings to defeat the visiting Boston Red Sox. He walked two and struck out three.
“Tyler, I thought, threw very well. He pitched to contact,” Angels manager Phil Nevin said. “But the counts got elevated, his pitch count got up. There was some three-ball counts there in the middle of it, but for the most part, he threw the ball really good.”
Anderson is 0-0 with a 6.52 ERA in two lifetime starts against the White Sox.
Los Angeles snapped a three-game losing streak with a 6-4 win against Chicago on Monday in the series opener. Matt Thaiss, Brandon Drury and Mike Trout each had multi-hit games for the Angels, with Drury and Thaiss socking back-to-back home runs in a four-run first inning for the visitors.
The White Sox have lost four of five but are hoping for stabilization in the back end of their bullpen after activating closer Liam Hendriks before Monday’s game.
In December, Hendriks, 34, was diagnosed with stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He underwent his final round of chemotherapy in April before making a series of minor league rehab appearances and throwing live batting practice sessions with the White Sox.
Hendriks allowed two runs in the eighth inning on Monday, but his appearance still delighted a crowd that remained in his corner. The right-hander received a standing ovation when he walked to the bullpen after the fourth inning.
“This is bigger than baseball, right?” Chicago manager Pedro Grifol said. “This is about life and the diagnosis and the comeback and how he did it and how good he was prior to (it) and how good he’s going to be afterward.
“This is just bigger than the game itself. What he’s done and how he’s done it has been remarkable. It’s an inspiration to everybody on this club, it’s an inspiration to everybody who follows the game and knows about Liam.”
Hendriks said postgame, “It was definitely emotional. It was … humbling going out there and seeing the amount of people wearing my shirts, the amount of people holding signs, flags or anything like that, the amount of people chanting.”
–Field Level Media
